The DaVinci Code, Part One

21 September 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

We are enlarged by an attitude of reverence. We are enlarged by putting ourselves in the service of ideals so transcendent they deserve to be called gods. And so let us be reverent. But let us not worship too quickly or thoughtlessly, for there are many gods, and most are not worthy of worship.

Let us never accept other people’s revelations if those proclamations demean us, or if they empower the few at the expense of the many.

Let us never say Amen to a sermon that does not teach abundant life for all God’s children, all children of the universe.

Let us worship at the altars of those ideals and gods which call us all to service, but which condemn no one to servitude or an attitude of servility. For above all things, God is love and not arrogance.

Let us worship only where it is a higher goal to serve truth than to bow before orthodoxy, for truth ever eludes our attempts to put it in the cages of our own limited understanding.

Let us gather where our minds are honored, our hearts nourished, where the angels of our better nature are helped to lift us up toward our true calling.

Our true calling. For we are all the children of God, the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself, in all its wondrous multiplicity. We all carry, and are carried by, what Hindus call the atman, that god-seed that is part of all that is holy and creative in the universe. Let us remember who we are meant to be, and honor that, nothing less. Nothing less.

Amen.

SERMON:

The DaVinci Code, Part One

Dan Brown’s book The DaVinci Code has generated more curiosity and excitement than any book about religion in years. Partly, it’s because he’s just a very good writer, and it’s a good read. But it is a book that basically says that Christian churches have been lying to their people for two thousand years about things as fundamental as who Jesus was, what he taught, whether he was ever really crucified, and his relationship with Mary Magdalen, who is really the central figure in this story.

The book is a novel, but it weaves together a lot of theories, and every theory presented is shared by some biblical scholars; some are shared by many. Some are pretty exciting, some are even sexy. But at a deeper level, the book grows out of, and is a powerful example of, a profound loss of trust and belief — not in God or Jesus, but in the things that Christian churches and teachers have said about them for twenty centuries.

This morning, I want to introduce you to some of the theories about Jesus, Mary Magdalen, their teachings, and the distortions created by those who ruled the Christian churches to hide these truths and mislead believers. Those are strong statements, but if any of the theories are correct, they are justified. And some of the theories are almost certainly correct.

I’m not trashing Christianity, as much as I’m exposing some of the ways it has betrayed and suppressed the original intent of Jesus. For what it’s worth — and to me it’s worth a lot — from my study of the teachings of Jesus, I think Jesus would hate what Christianity has done in his name.

There are so many threads woven together in this story, I’ll just tell the story first, then unweave some of the individual threads. Here’s the story, which will sound fantastic and unbelievable to almost everyone raised in Western civilization:

It revolves around Mary Magdalen, who was portrayed as a whore by the Catholic Church for centuries, it was only a few years ago (1969) that the Church acknowledged that there was no truth to the story that she was a whore, that the story had been invented by the Church. That was 25 years before the Pope acknowledged, in 1994, that they knew Jesus hadn’t really been born on December 25th, the date of the winter solstice in the ancient calendar. The reason such a scurrilous story was invented about her was to hide the fact that Jesus ranked her above all the apostles. The Gospel of Philip, one of the works recovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls, says that Mary was Jesus’ favorite, and he was often seen kissing her on the mouth.

But even more, some say, she was Jesus’ wife. It was a special kind of marriage, a holy marriage that represented the symbol of the highest spiritual union in their religion, which was not Judaism but the cult of Isis, which Jesus, and perhaps Mary, learned in Egypt. Jesus was a magician who learned his trade in Egypt with the priests of the cult of Isis, which was a very popular cult in the Middle East at the time. Even the Talmudic writings of the first century say that Jesus went to Egypt to study magic with the priests of the Isis cult.

Mary’s name, according to quite a few scholars, contains the clue to her greatness. While some in the Christian tradition claim it just meant she came from the town of Migdal, others say the word Magdalen meant “the greater.” Mary the greater. Greater than whom? Greater than Mary the mother. Some very good and respected biblical scholars think this is correct. (Others suggest her name may have denoted her hometown: of Magdala in Egypt. These suggest that this Mary was black, which is the secret behind the cult of the Black Madonnas, that she was a priestess in the Isis cult, and that her “anointing” of Jesus with the oils described in the gospels was the anointing that made him the Christ: literally, “the anointed one.” However, this would have made Jesus the anointed one in the cult of Isis.

Jesus and his father Joseph were of the tribe of David, one of the two remaining tribes of the earlier ten tribes of Israel. Mary may have been from the tribe of Benjamin, the other tribe. So their marriage was a kind of holy marriage, uniting the remaining tribes of Israel. (Yes, this is a wholly different story than the one suggesting that Mary was an Egyptian. There are many plausible stories. But almost all the alternative stories make more sense, insult the mind less, and have more objective history behind them than the orthodox story.)

But Jesus, as even the gospels make clear, was considered to be born illegitimate. This didn’t mean that Joseph and Mary hadn’t been married. Joseph was a priest in this radical Jewish sect, and legitimate heirs to the line had to be born in September. A priest and his wife were only permitted to have sex in December, to insure this. But Jesus, some scholars say, was born in March of 7 BC. [1] So, ritually and technically, he was illegitimate. Once a son was born, there could not be sex for six more years, so that sons were to be separated by seven years. Jesus’ younger brother James was born seven years later, in September. To many, this made James, not Jesus, the legitimate heir to the rulership of this tribal religious group.

But by staging a crucifixion, Jesus could claim that he had been “raised up” by God, which would give him the political edge over James. That was the purpose of the crucifixion, which was phony but not fatal. Jesus died in the year 67, at the age of 74.[2]

Some scholars believe that Jesus and Mary Magdalen had at least two children: a daughter born in 33, and a son called Jesus Justus, born in 36 or 37, and mentioned in the Book of Acts. Mary was involved in volatile disputes over the leadership of the movement, with Peter. Peter said in one of the recovered gospels that Mary should be sent away because women were not worthy of life. And Mary, in another gospel, said she feared Peter because he hated the whole female race. The misogyny and patriarchy of much Christianity is a reminder of this early struggle — and of which side won.

In the year 44, after losing the power struggle with Peter, Mary went to southern France, as the New Testament gospels say. She took her daughter by Jesus. Some scholars say she also took Jesus Justus, others say he remained in Judea.

But once in France, Mary became immensely important. Everyone knows there are hundreds of Catholic cathedrals dedicated to “Notre Dame,” or “Our Lady,” throughout France. But it is now clear that for over two hundred of them, including the most famous of all, the cathedral at Chartres, the “Lady” referred to in the many cathedrals of “Notre Dame” was not the Virgin Mary, but Mary Magdalen. It is undeniable, I think, that there was a powerful cult of Mary Magdalen in France that has continued to the present day. There is also a town in southern France where the locals participate in an annual sacred festival — a kind of parade through the streets where the skull of Mary Magdalen, encased in metal, is paraded through the streets each year. While it seems unlikely that we could ever verify through DNA or other testing that this is Mary Magdalen’s skull, there’s no clear way of proving that it isn’t, either.

Her worship was mixed with the cult of the Black Madonna and, in southern France, churches whose symbols and history showed them to be concerned with the cult of Isis, the very ancient Egyptian cult of the goddess Isis, of her dead and resurrected husband Osiris, and their holy child. Christian scholars have long acknowledged that the statues of Isis and her son were the models for the sculptures of Mary and Jesus. The lines between these cults of Mary Magdalen, the Black Madonna and Isis seem blurred and confused, as least from the reading I’ve done so far.

So one great secret hidden in this story was the fact that, according to some biblical scholars, Jesus did not die in the crucifixion, that he married, had children, and preferred Mary Magdalen above Peter and all the other apostles.

Another secret, according to the story, is that the royal bloodline of Jesus and Mary continued in France, and continues to the present day. It produced the line of Merovingian kings of the 4th and 5th centuries, who were later betrayed by the Catholic Church. But the bloodline continued, later producing the Stuart kings. Some other books on these subjects have photographs taken in 1979 and later, of a man and a young boy in France who are claimed as living descendents of Jesus and Mary Magdalen.

There are other secrets involved in this complex story, and not all of them seem to be known. Perhaps the existence of Mary’s skeleton or other skeletal relics, or of John the Baptist’s head: John the Baptist is regarded far more highly in these groups than Jesus is. I’m not yet clear on the exact role of John the Baptist, but it does seem clear that he had a different and more important role than the tradition has given him. Many scholars who studied the Dead Sea Scrolls are quite sure that the person called The Teacher of Righteousness there was John the Baptist, and that his enemy, called the Man of Lies and similar things, was Jesus.

There’s sex in this story, too. The highest spiritual union in the Isis cult was symbolized and acted out in a ritualized sexual union. This, some say, was the nature of the marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalen. It was also reenacted at least annually in the secret religious rites. Historically, this seems to be true, and it seems to be true that these rites were practiced in some of the religious groups in southern France that were known publicly as Roman Catholic Christians, but which were secretly still following the ancient teachings and rituals of the cult of Isis, as taught by Jesus and then Mary Magdalen.

This may sound like a bad soap opera or a worse “reality-TV” program, and a student of history or religion might wonder “So what?” But these teachings, and these sexual rites, had an important theological message which posed a fundamental threat to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, if not of all Christian churches.

What Jesus and Mary were teaching, they say was a kind of salvation that was the complete opposite of the kind of salvation taught by the Catholic Church, as well as nearly all other Christian churches. The message was that salvation — which meant a kind of wholeness, completion, here and now — was achieved, in the perfect union between a man and a woman, as symbolized by the sexual rite. Salvation is free, it is open to all, and it involves embracing life and sexuality.

About now, a politically correct question comes to my mind, as it may also to yours. That question is “What about homosexuality?” And while it isn’t included in The DaVinci Code, it is a recent historical discussion. I’ll tell you this side story quickly. In 1958, a biblical scholar from Columbia named Morton Smith said he found, in a library in a monastery near Jerusalem, some papers stuck in the endnotes of a 17th century book. These papers were transcriptions of a letter supposedly written by Clement of Alexandria, a late second century giant of the Christian church. Clement was explaining that there was a secret ending to the gospel of Mark which was not put into the Bible because it would confuse or offend new Christians — he and others called them “Babes in Christ.” These teachings, he said, were only for the initiates, the insiders, not the Babes.

The passage is shocking. It is about a naked young man covered only in a white robe who approached Jesus. It says Jesus spent several nights with him, and introduced him to the kingdom of God. The Greek language used is specifically sexual. It is referring to a homosexual encounter between Jesus and this naked young man.

When Morton Smith published this forty years ago, almost no one took him seriously, and for a variety of reasons. For one, no one else had ever seen these papers. For another, Smith was homosexual, so people didn’t trust his motives. However, it was curious that the monastery would not let anyone else in to look for these papers. It remained a minor mystery for decades.

But a few years ago, other scholars did go into the monastery, and they found the documents, which said exactly what Morton Smith had said they did. The Jesus Seminar has now published photographs of these documents in their quarterly magazine for all the world to see. Was Jesus involved in a cult in which sexual initiation played a key role, and did that initiation involve both heterosexual and homosexual unions? So far, there is not enough data to know, or to make a very strong argument. But the papers about the secret part of Mark do exist. Maybe we’ll learn more about this in years to come. Some people feel this would be terrible news if it’s true; others could see it as a liberation that’s long overdue.

All of this, as you can imagine, is highly damaging to the orthodox picture of Jesus, Mary, Christianity and the churches. That’s why it has had to be kept secret.

And history shows us a very real and bloody example of the danger of letting this secret out. In the 13th century there was a Christian group in France known as the Cathars, or Cathari. Among their beliefs was the assertion that Jesus and Mary Magdalen were sexual lovers, though not married. The Roman Catholic Church organized armies of men to capture, torture, murder, and burn alive all the Cathars they could find in what are called the Albigensian Crusades, named after a town where many Cathari lived. Tens of thousands, perhaps many more of them, were slaughtered in what may be the first example of genocide in the past thousand years, perpetrated by the Roman Catholic Church to exterminate those who held this belief. So it was indeed dangerous to hold beliefs about Jesus that threatened the authority or teachings of the Church.

The book The DaVinci Code, and quite a few other books in these areas, argue that several organizations have been created to protect these secrets. The one mentioned most in the book was the Priory of Sion. This is a fascinating organization, which seems to have existed and may still exist. Its grand masters have included some of history’s most brilliant geniuses, including Leonardo DaVinci, the scientists Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau. One thing all these men had in common was a profound interest in the occult. As many of you may know, Isaac Newton spent four decades practicing alchemy, and his personal writings include more than ten thousand pages on the subject.

But other groups involved in protecting these secrets have included, they say, the Knights Templar from the late 12th century, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. And while I’ve read a few books on these other groups so far and am still not clear on all the details, there seems to be something to this, too.

So what do you do with all of this? After I’ve done more reading in these areas, I’ll add another sermon or two to this series. But for now, there are some important things hidden behind the fascination so many people are finding with the ideas presented in The DaVinci Code.

To borrow the title from Al Franken’s understated new book, you could say this story is about Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. It is a story of a major religion which has betrayed and suppressed the message of Jesus, a message which empowered people directly, without the need for any mediators. Jesus didn’t come to start a church; he came to set people free by telling them that God loved them, loved all of them equally, and that when we treated one another as children of God, the kingdom of God would be here. Amen, end of sermon, end of religion.

Jesus never preached sin and salvation, he never promised heaven or threatened with hell, though the writer of the gospel of John does. He came to empower people. The church changed the story to empower the leaders of the church and, later, the political and military rulers of countries, Christianity is still being used this way by our president and many conservative preachers even today, when they order God to “bless America” and whip up the believers for a holy war against Arabs and Muslims who coincidentally happen to own a lot of oil. The same tactics are being used by fundamentalist Muslims who demean and dishonor the teachings of Muhammad by reducing Allah to the same kind of patriarchal, hierarchical, violent deity.

In Jesus’ religion, there is no mediator; no one stands between you and God. In Christianity, the pope, priests and churches become mediators, who write the rules of your salvation. The two could not be more opposed.

Jesus celebrated life. In his own time he was called a glutton and a drunkard, and there is growing evidence that he was indeed married and a father, and may even have played a role in the sexual initiation of a young man. These secrets, even 1800 years ago, were hidden from the newcomers, from the “Babes in Christ,” who the church leaders thought needed the superstition and magic, and were not ready for the simple teachings of Jesus that could set them free from the powerful rule of the church. Both political leaders and churches have suppressed this through most of Western history, to make leaders powerful and people obedient.

It is a question of trust, of truth, of lies, betrayal and deception of several billions of people who were sold a religion that Jesus would have detested.

The orthodox will see this, I suspect, as a bad thing, an assault on faith, an enemy of God. I see, or at least hope I see, something else behind this. I see some glimmer of hope that some of the “Babes in Christ” have had enough, that they want the truth that sets them free rather than the untruths that bind them to inadequate models of human life and bad theology.

I see, or at least hope, that we might be seeing people in our time decide to replay the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Originally, Eve’s decision to seek knowledge and to share it freely was condemned. Maybe this time Eve will win. And if Eve wins, maybe we will too.

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[1] The source of this dating is the Australian biblical scholar Barbara Thiering. She is a controversial scholar, which means she colors outside the orthodox lines. I know Barbara, and have been on an invitational worldwide e-list of scholars discussing her work with her for three years. I respect her absolutely; her arguments are footnoted with references to original sources in several languages. But though I think I’ve read a fair amount in this area, I don’t have a clue whether she’s right. She is being quoted fairly regularly by other authors working in these non-orthodox areas of interest.

[2] Barbara Thiering again. See her books Jesus the Man (also called Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and Jesus of the Apocalypse: the Life of Jesus after the Crucifixion). While other authors (like Lawrence Gardner) have made similar claims about Jesus’ life, marriages (two), and children (two with Mary, one daughter with Lydia), Barbara says all such claims have come from her work, or from distortions of it.